The present invention relates to transmitting information in a telecommunication network, particularly in a mobile network.
It relates more specifically to the cooperation between service providers in the network and the operator in charge of the network.
The amount and volume of digital content accessible on IP-based (“Internet Protocol”) mobile telecommunication networks are growing exponentially. To accommodate this growth, network operators are deploying organized and hierarchical architectures such as CDNs (“Content Delivery Networks”) and supplemental functions such as PCC (“Policy and Charging Control”), which is described in the 3GPP standard “Technical Specification Group Core Network and Terminals; Policy and Charging Control over Rx reference point”, TS 29.214, version 11.8.0 of Mar. 15, 2013.
Such hierarchical architectures allow enhancing the mobile network with associated services such as “Turbo Button” or “Data Booster”. When customers are differentiated by quality of service, particularly a high quality “premium” service and a lower quality “non-premium” service, both services allow offering a “non-premium” customer a “premium” quality of service for a given service during a given period of time. A service is activated at the express request of the customer or when a service is requested that requires “premium” network service quality.
In an OTT (“Over The Top”) type of architecture, a customer is both a customer of an OTT service provider and of the mobile network operator.
In the event that a CDN broker is inserted between the service provider and the network operator, the CDN broker is able to choose a resource delivery (CDN or server)/network pair, according to criteria based on the quality of the user experience.
In this case, the CDN broker can exclude a CDN/network pair when most user terminals of customers supplied by that network are returning unfavorable quality ratings for the CDN/network pair (network congestion for example). The ranking of the CDN/network pair is thus downgraded by the CDN broker, possibly to a level where it is no longer selectable for providing mobile customers with a service delivered in OTT mode.
A third-party service provider should be able to differentiate the quality of service it provides between different categories of network clients.
Network operators have no means of prioritizing a category of customers when the customers are using an OTT type of service. Indeed, for a service provided by a third-party service provider, and for which the quality of service is managed solely by a third-party service provider, the network operator can only guarantee its “premium” customers that they will not experience a degradation of quality of service, whether these customers are customers with a “premium” subscription or have activated a “Turbo Button” or “Data Booster” service for a given period. Thus, the desired categorization of mobile customers by the network operator has no effect on OTT services.
There is therefore a need to reinforce the cooperation between network operators and service providers, to enable effective categorization of users.